


Whisper Through the Walls

by Anonymous



Category: BioShock Infinite, 弱虫ペダル | Yowamushi Pedal
Genre: F/M, Other, selfcest, sooooort of implied sexual content, the Bioshock Infinite AU no one asked for, this whole thing is a disaster I'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 12:58:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7172702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a SASO2016 Bonus Round 2 prompt, over here:</p><p>http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/13854.html?thread=4913950#cmt4913950</p><p>Toudou's counterpart from another reality kidnaps him. They mess up history a bit, and try to set it right again. They also kiss each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whisper Through the Walls

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how to even explain what this is. This is a Bioshick Infinite AU, but I don't know if it'll make more sense to people who HAVE played the game or those who haven't. This is an AU where, when Fukutomi pulled Kinjou off his bike, there were far greater consequences. This is an AU where that act serves as the equivalent of Booker's grave sin. There is no Elizabeth here. Arakita is kind of Comstock, I guess. This is a mess, I'm sorry. The important part is that Toudou is the Lutece "twins" and this is all an excuse for them to be in love.
> 
> None of this makes any sense, probably? If I had more time to make this really long and more worldbuild-y it would be easier to tell what's going on, but, well. This is for a timed competition, and also I don't know if I could live with myself if I spent months plotting and writing this as an extended, multi-chapter thing. I'm ashamed enough as it is.

“It might not change things the way you want.”

“Don’t you think that either way, an innocent man shouldn’t be pushed to his death?”

“Not _to his death._ ” A beautiful girl stares Toudou down. The most beautiful girl in the world—in any world—because she is also Toudou. Somehow, that doesn’t mean they don’t argue.

“Well, not _here,_ ” he says, with a grand sweep of his arm to the garage they’re standing in.

“That’s neither here nor there.” She sighs, bored, and retrieves a nail file from the pocket of her jersey.

“Right, neither _here_ nor _there_ , but in tons of other places!” This argument isn’t working, and he knows it. Because he knows her. Same brain, operating on the same patterns. The thing is, this is _her_ world, so it’s easy for her to be satisfied. She’s got what she wants, which is him. But even though Toudou can understand and appreciate the feeling that he is the only thing a person could possibly want in life, some part of him can’t feel satisfied. Because— “Don’t you love Mount Hakone?”

She blows the residue off her nails and tucks the file away again. “Of course I do. And we can always find a perfectly nice view.”

“Neither here nor there,” he says. “I’ve seen it. Unless Kinjou wins that race, Hakone falls.”

“Not everywhere. We can go somewhere you like better.”

There’s only one way. “Maybe _you_ can,” he says. “I’m going to fix it whether you come with me or not.”

“I never said I would stop you.” She smiles a version of his smile that feels a touch milder, but maybe it’s only because her hair is unrestrained, framing her face. Or maybe it’s because she’s looking at him. “I just don’t believe in the exercise.”

“Biking?” Toudou asks.

“No,” she says, planting a hand against her hip in a way that’s so familiar, he wants to mirror it. “Biking is excellent exercise, obviously.”

 

\--

 

When she brought him here, he’d had a headache. Will have had a headache, whatever—tenses are so confusing once time is no longer linear and anything that happens is already happening somewhere else in a million other ways.

The headache hadn’t started immediately, but it had been inevitable from the beginning, so it seems as though it had. She had cradled him in her arms as his mind tried to collect a reason for him to be here, in a world where he never existed because she did instead. That hurt. He’d touched his face, and his hand had come back wet.

“Am I bleeding?”

“Just a nosebleed. Isn’t that what happens when you see a pretty girl?”

He hadn’t looked at her yet, though. Not until he heard those words did he look at her face, and realize that he already knew it. Because it was his own.

“And I,” she had continued, “am a very pretty girl.”

 

\--

 

Toudou (the one from this world) doesn’t know the details of Arakita’s relationship with Fukutomi, or so she says. She only knows that if she does as Arakita says, she is rewarded handsomely. She has a spacious bedroom and an even more office all to herself in a wing of Arakita’s mansion. She has her own garage, too, which she uses more than the office. It’s all very funny, because the Arakita in the other world is stingy and broke. Altering the outcome of one race shouldn’t turn a delinquent into a rich and powerful elite. But it probably shouldn’t bring down mountains, either, and Toudou (the one from the other world) knows that’s going to happen, too. Happened. Happens. Will happen.

It seems clear, in any case, that Arakita isn’t in this for the power and glory. If that were the case, it could have been anyone wearing Hakone’s jersey to finish first in that race. But for Arakita, it’s always been an imperative that the winner is Fukutomi. At any cost. Which is why, when he gets wind of what Toudou and her new “twin” are planning, he sends an assassin. The wrong Toudou recognizes him, but as someone who, in this world, he is not.

In the end, he doesn’t destroy Toudou (not either of them). He destroys the bridge they’re trying to cross. But realities can only dead-end; they can’t be severed. Before, there was a world where Toudou was supposed to be, trying to pull him back in; and a world where he ended up, trying to accommodate him. Now he and his other are accommodated by endless, infinite worlds.

In at least one of them, Toudou feels sure, Kinjou Shingo wins the Interhigh and everything goes back to (more or less) normal. _She_ isn’t so sure, but he comes out on top in most of their bets anyway.

“Could we grab some of your merchandise when we go through this time?” She asks once, sitting on a broken mini-fridge in the garage and kicking her legs absentmindedly. She’s wearing a shirt that hangs off one shoulder, showing one bright orange strap of her sports bra. It’s a good look on her, and it would be good on him, too. One of the blessings of their separate realities lies in the discovery of different fashion choices, from which they can now mix and match freely. “A poster with your face on it, or something. We can hang it up with our medals, wouldn’t that be cute?”

“Some of that stuff is made by the fanclub,” Toudou says.

“Sign a bromide for me, then.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t get the other stuff,” Toudou says. “I think they’d gladly hand it over to my darling twin sister, once they know she exists.”

She pouts. “I’m not your sister,” she says, sticking out a lower lip shiny with lip gloss.

“How else will we explain it to them?”

She was the one who called him “brother” first, once. She doesn’t call him that anymore.

“I still want your autograph,” she says. “Please? Sign, sign.”

He uncaps a marker and scrawls _TODO_ across her exposed collarbone, and she giggles.

The lip gloss tastes like grapes.

 

\--

 

The story Arakita knows about the bridge is that Toudou somehow cleverly created it herself. He’s not stupid, though, and his suspicious nature is particularly focused on Toudou, so maybe he knows in some capacity that she just sort of _found_ it.

What he doesn’t know is that the boy she dragged back, the one whose name is _Jinpachi_ which sounds nothing like _Yua_ , was not from a reality where Toudou’s parents had a different child—he was from a reality where they had the _same_ child, with a few negligible differences. If he knew, he might have had a different view of how close the two were to each other. They were always careful not to finish each other’s sentences in front of him.

As far as he knows, now, they must probably be dead. Or else trapped somewhere they can’t interfere. He doesn’t guess that Toudou still lives in her old room, just a couple of dimensional steps out of Arakita’s vision. She brings in new flowers when the ones in the vase on her vanity start to wilt, and she hangs up pictures of mountains she wants to climb, sticks notes to them about when and where the weather and the view will be the prettiest. As soon as all of this business with Fuku is over, she’s due for a long vacation. Racing herself in the prettiest places anywhere is all she cares about.

She does wonder, though, from time to time, how Arakita feels about her “death.” She’s not _heartless;_ she does think about these things. But as soon as she gets close to the conclusion that he’d be more upset to learn they’re altering reality so that he never meets Fukutomi, she has to stop. She has to drag Jinpachi out of the desk chair and kiss him against the wall until she can’t think of anything else at all.

“Kinjou doesn’t die,” she says a time or two, when she slips.

“That’s not true,” Jinpachi says. “You mean that he _didn’t_ die, not that he _doesn’t._ ”

“He’s alive _here._ ” In this and similar worlds. In the worlds where they were together, almost all of them, before the upset Arakita’s assassin tore wide open. Now the realities where they are together is equal to _all of them,_ so It’s impossible to quantify percentages.

“That’s not the same thing as _doesn’t,_ ” he says, sweat crawling along the line of his jaw. “Also, it doesn’t matter.”

What matters is that they have the exact same heart rate, both resting and active. On this, they can agree.

 

\--

 

“What if you took it a step further?” she asks, after the latest failed attempt to get Fuku to race honorably on his own. “There have got to be—like, okay, for example: a world where the Interhigh isn’t held on this course.”

“I’ve seen them,” he says. “They’re worlds with no bicycles, or worse.”

She wrinkles her nose in distaste, not even sure what’s worse than a world with no bikes. At this point, she kind of wants to just give him the answer. All he sees is a blank page. But what’s to come is her burden to carry, not his.

They chase Fukutomi through places where he starts his high school career at a different school. Places where the captain during his first year is someone else, someone who likes him less. Places where his bike gets stolen outside a doctor’s office. None of them are quite right, but there’s always next time.

 

\--

 

When the right “next time” finally comes, when it all starts to click into place, neither of them knows it as first. It’s just one more almost-identical timeline to the one Yua pulled Jinpachi from. Same course, same crowd, the air even smells just as it did before Jinpachi’s memories started trying to rewrite themselves to fit him into Yua’s life.

She gets it first, standing with spectators by the starting line, holding a fan with Jinpachi’s face on it like she’s posing for a picture. She knows this is the right timeline because she’s seen it already. She can’t even remember how long it’s been clear to her.

He doesn’t know until after the first checkpoint. All of a sudden he’s tugging on her sleeve and hissing, “Where’s Arakita?”

He doesn’t even mean _where on the course_ ; he means _where, in the vast expanse of this reality._

“Not racing,” she says unnecessarily, because Jinpachi has certainly already figured that part out. “This isn’t your team.”

It _is_ his team, inasmuch as they’re wearing the right jersey. What she means is that this Hakone Gakuen Cycling Club aren’t the Kings. Toudou peers into other corners of this reality, catches the differences he’s forgotten to count. Sohoku, at this Interhigh, are the returning champions.

Fukutomi has no legacy to defend. He isn’t even wearing the ace’s number.

Jinpachi runs a nervous hand through his hair. Yua wraps her arm around his waist.

“I’m not going to be famous,” he says. “What about my fanclub?”

“There’s still a fanclub.”

“But it’s smaller,” he laments. It’s harder to give something up when you’re used to having it.

“But you have your mountain, don’t you?” She drums her fingers against his side. “And you have me. Do you really need anything else?”

“Hmm.” He wants to move further up the course, so he can watch Kinjou cross the finish line. For closure, or something. “Nope.”

 “Do you love me?” she asks.

“More than anything else in the world.”

She laughs loudly. “That’s the most conceited thing I’ve ever heard!”

“You’re one to talk.” He faces her, points an accusatory finger. “Aren’t you the same?”

Yua’s hair blows in her face, and she tucks it behind her ear. It’s always doing that, obstructing her vision and sticking on her lips. Jinpachi hasn’t sold her on the practicality of headbands yet, but they’ll get there.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m the same.”


End file.
